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Sunday, February 26, 2012

The virtues as primary colors

One final post about The Bourgeois Virtues. She has an attractive metaphor for how the seven basic virtues can be combined, like primary colors.

The seven virtues of the Western tradition before Kant are ethical primary colors, the red, blue, and yellow not derivable from others but themselves able to form other colors. "The cardinal virtues," Aquinas notes, "are called more principal, not because they are more perfect than all the other virtues, but because human life more principally turns on them and the other virtues are based on them."' Blue plus yellow yields green. Love plus faith yields loyalty. Courage plus prudence yields enterprise. Temperance plus justice yields humility. Justice, courage, and faith yields honesty.

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This is a blog about how the economy, and more importantly, daily life is changing. We have dazzling new possibilities as productivity soars and technology improves. But we are mired in continual crisis. What should we do about it? You can read more about me here, including why I stay anonymous.
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